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This is pretty far off-topic, and most likely to result in a bunch of yelling back and forth between True Believers.
Flagged.
EDIT:
OP didn’t even bother to link to the claimed “increasing evidence”. This is a bait thread. Please don’t.
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It’s possible that many of your coworkers are more politically aware than they let on, and deliberately avoid talking about it in the workplace in order to avoid conflict with people who they need to work with in order to continue earning money.
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Obviously “off-topic-ness” is subjective, but so far your prediction re: yelling back and forth hasn’t happened.
Probably because everyone on this site is good and right-thinking — or knows well enough to keep his head down and his mouth shut.
(Which has nothing to do with the truth of either side’s beliefs; regardless of truth, why cause trouble for no gain?)
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To me, the people on this site definitely handle these discussions better. Hard to say how much better given that’s subjective. Let’s try for objective criteria: there’s less flame wars, more people sticking to the facts as they see them vs comments that re pure noise, and moderation techniques usually reduce the worst stuff without censorship of erasing civil dissenters. If those metrics are sound, then Lobsters community are objectively better at political discussions than many sites.
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Here are some articles for your reading.
https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/worse-climate/
Some of those articles link to other articles. You can get pretty deep if you want.
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These all seem to say one thing: climate change is going to be worse faster than some other prediction said. But that does not even remotely address your claim that “organized human life might not be possible by the end of the century and possibly sooner”. What on earth makes you think you know anything about what conditions humans need to organize?
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Global warming is important, but realistically we can’t address it until we have regained political stability (and significantly improved on the pre-Trump status quo). Goals for the next 10 years are:
- keep my family safe
- avoid civil war, fascism, etc.
- repair the cultural rift that has people at each others’ throats
If I can make impacts on longer term issues during that time, great, but it’s hard to think about right now.
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So, essentially you’re saying that since Trump was elected we are collectively incapable of doing anything but running in circles shouting about imminent fascism? Any efforts to improve technology wrt. environmental impact cannot realistically be expected to succeed, because politics? Seems like a terrible, self-defeating attitude to me.
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Global warming is not a technological problem insofar as you can’t just invent a widget to solve global warming. Even if your widget is something like “planetary scale air filter”, you will not be able to build or operate it without social/political backing. Also:
If I can make impacts on longer term issues during that time, great
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It’s not a black and white issue, and it’s not going to be ‘solved’ by one major breakthrough. Their point is just that there’s no reason why the current political situation in the USA needs to bring everything to a halt. If you don’t have the time or headspace to deal with it right now, that’s absolutely okay (what matters is you’re aware of it)! Everyone’s circumstances are different, but collectively, we can’t afford to just put it on hold, and it doesn’t have to be at the expense of other important issues. If anything, I’d hope that it might have the power to bring people closer together (if a threat to humanity can’t do that, what can?).
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Did mere technology or lobbying/sales decide what kinds of power plants will be all over many countries? Did technology itself create the disposable culture that adds to waste or did user demand? Is there a technological solution in sight for the methane emissions from cattle whose beef is in high demand? On other side, would we be storing endless amounts of data in these data centers appearing everywhere if technology didn’t make storage and computing so cheap? And is there a technological solution to avoiding them throwing that stuff away on a regular basis when customers want new stuff or manager want metrics to change? Is there a technological solution to getting people who neither care nor are legally required to care to stop doing damaging behaviors?
Sounds more like people-oriented decisions are causing most of the problem. Even if you create a beneficial technology, those people might create new practices or legislation that reduce or counter its benefits. Actually, that’s the default thing they do which they’re doing right now on a massive scale. I think we just got lucky with low-power chips/appliances since longer-lasting batteries and cheaper, utility bills are immediate benefits for most people that just happen to benefit the environment on the side.
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It is obviously not merely technology that got us here. But these problems are all about technology on a fundamental level and if we want things to change, we need the tech that makes these changes viable. No point lobbying for an alternative that does not exist.
Sounds more like people-oriented decisions are causing most of the problem.
Always an interplay of technology- and people-oriented decisions. But changing technology is much easier compared to changing people, which has resulted in utter dystopia many times.
Even if you create a beneficial technology, those people might create new practices or legislation that reduce or counter its benefits.
Same with well-intentioned legislation. But companies have no intrinsic incentive not to use beneficial technology, only to inflate its impact for marketing purposes (like the faked car emissions). They do have an incentive to game legislation, otherwise there would be no point to that legislation (in general; individual cases might profit from being good examples).
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Nothing hugely shocking here. If you have a decentralized system without end to end crypto then servers can read all your stuff, its the same with email and gmail scanning all of your emails.
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Which is why we shouldn’t build decentralised (or centralised) systems without end-to-end crypto any longer.
There’s no reason why something like Mastodon couldn’t have anonymous (unsigned, unencrypted), public (signed, unencrypted), group (signed, encrypted to a group — ‘friends’ is merely one group), and unlisted (signed, encrypted) posts. Yes, there are some key management challenges (particularly around key management & re-encryption as one adds & deletes friends), but they are no insurmountable.
I strongly believe that writing systems without cryptographically-strong privacy in 2018 is an error.
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Well off the top of my hat, key management issues arise whenever you try to use it across multiple machines. Now you could manually copy the key from machine to machine, but if you ever use two machines simultaneously it creates a sort of fork in your identity on the network, which causes plenty of trouble.
There are a few solutions under research, most notable a master / slave system, but last time I checked it was still very much in the design phase.
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This is easily said, but both end to end crypto and key management add a huge amount of complexity to the system. If you need the privacy that e2e can provide, this is of course worth it, but it’s not at all clear that every service needs this. The fediverse is meant for public and targeted messages, not private ones. For those usecases, people can easily use e2e encrypted systems like matrix or gpg.
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Hear hear! I think everyone has this vision of a perfect crypt-opia where we can conduct our social networking safe from the prying eyes of government or BigCorps, but the realities of making this happen are as you say not at all trivial.
It’s a great goal, and one I think people should continue working towards, but the logistics are hard.
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I don’t know if I agree. When I publish toots on Mastodon, all they know is that feoh@amicable.feoh.org said blah blah blah.
When I use Facebook, they are collecting a SUPER rich trove of demographic data on me, cross referencing it with other commercial sources (my employer for one :) and linking it in with my “social graph” where my friends data is taken into account. It’s the difference between a linked list of nodes with 2 or 3 fields and a full on acyclic graph with zillions of nodes and zillions more connections.
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all they know is that feoh@amicable.feoh.org said blah blah blah.
Anyone can also see who you are following, who you reply too, whos posts you like, what kind of content you like and then draw a graph based on this data. The main thing you lose is the tracking using apps to see more than what you post but a huge huge amount of data anyone can see can be used to track you and build a profile on you.
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By ‘anyone’ you mean ‘any Fediverse user’ right? Also there’s a huge difference between having to scrap the correlate vast gobs of data yourself and having it handed to you for analysis on a silver platter by the platform.
Anyway, this is silly. I agree that social media is at odds with privacy to an extent, but some platforms are factually, provably better than others.
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also there’s nothing stopping you from using clientside tools that provide this.
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How would you do this while still allowing mastodon to be used from a web interface? If it’s implemented using javascript you’re in the exact same situation of having to trust the instance administrator.
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Exactly. You said that there’s no reason why it couldn’t do this, there’s your reason.
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agreed. It seems mostly useful for like novices.
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If you store things on other people’s servers they are on other people’s servers. I don’t see how this statement is a resignation. If you want your posts to be private in the fediverse, encrypt it. If you want your emails, posts,etc to be private, encrypt them.
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I was not talking about @mercer article: as you said it can be pretty useful for novices.
What scares me is that we could design something better, but there is not much research about the topic.
No one really try to challenge the status quo with original engineering solutions, in a sort of resignation.
At best, people are waiting for mathematicians to create a cheap fully homomorphic encryption scheme.
But I’m afraid it’s not lazyness, but lack of vision, interest and hope.
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Vision, interest, and hope are not valid inputs to compilers.
I think a reasonable compromise in new system design (taken in some side projects of mine) is to assume that the channels of communication are compromised by hostile actors, that storage exists in the datacenters of hostile actors who are actively trying to munge through the contents, and that mere possession of encrypted material is of significant interest to the hostile actors.
You end up with a sort of “I am Spartacus” setup for communication systems under those constraints, where everybody by definition has open-access to all communications but all communications are also encrypted such that if you have a key you can read it and otherwise you are just providing storage–and because everybody has copies of the content, the metadata of how it moves through the system is not super interesting. Of course, the flipside is that participation in such a system is almost always a red flag.
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If you can’t read the code on the server, and you can’t, then you can’t know it was actually encrypted. The only thing you can do is end to end encryption, which you can already do on top of all of these existing services. What we need is education of the tools that already exist and also improving ease of use. The moment you put the tech on the server you’ve already lost. Otherwise the tech you’re describing already exists.
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I agree with you about education. I deeply agree.
But with fully homomorphic encryption you can know it’s encrypted even without seeing the code.
I’m not entirely sure that no other mitigation is possible: my insight is that too few have tried to challenge the http/dns/browser/javascript stack to get a chance to find a solution.
My bet is that we just need to open our minds.
Still, you are right: there’s no cloud, just another person’s computer… ;-)
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This is really neat! It makes me want to dive into writing my own framebuffer utilities. Some thoughts:
For things like a clock or a battery indicator, tmux has a ‘status’ option and screen has a ‘hardstatus’ option. Both of these tools make the a console-sans-xorg experience quite enjoyable.
For other framebuffer tools, try jfbview (pdf viewer) or libxine’s fbxine (video player).
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I’ve forgone tmux and screen because (at least tmux) adds noticeable input lag, and I find neovim’s terminal emulator more convenient (one set of keys for managing windows, unified “clipboard” vim registers). If I really need a detachable session, I wrote another simple tool for that.
I’ve used jfbview (or maybe a fork) to read Intel manuals. I don’t think there are sound drivers for my Chromebook so watching videos probably isn’t going to happen. Framebuffer tools really don’t get enough love, though!
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(at least tmux) adds noticeable input lag
I’m not sure if it’s the only input lag you were noticing, but the biggest annoyance in this respect for me goes away if you add
set -s escape-time 0to your .tmux.conf. By default tmux pauses for a half-second after ESC before sending it through, in order to allow using ESC+key as equivalent to Meta+key for tmux bindings (like emacs does). Which is probably fine if you don’t use vim, but is very annoying in vim. Setting the delay to 0 does of course mean that you can’t use ESC+key sequences for tmux bindings.
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eising
7 months ago
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link
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Need advise on where to build a BBS/Chat like service for a like-minded group across school systems.
Slack seems the favorite of the current times, and it seems to be usable by non-technical people as well.
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Yeah - in my experience slack is quite good for social groups and passing the time, but not so useful for serious talk or information sharing.
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Try Zulip. The conversation is filterable by stream (like slack’s channels) and futher filterable by topic (like threads). https://zulipchat.com/
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Simplicity comes in different forms. You may find sequential mutation on a set of variables simple, but another person may find mutation-free substitution of variables simple. These techniques are also applicable in different problem domains.
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plredmond
8 months ago
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Websites use your CPU to mine cryptocurrency even when you close your browser
Title is misleading. Browser isn’t closed, just the tab.
A pop-under window opened by offending website remains mining.
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Time for Password Expiration to Expire
Suggested tag: opinion
Haha. That would apply to about everything here without a demo, though. (Pause.) Maybe your real goal is a product or demo with every comment. Hmmm.
suggested tag: wrong